You Came To Me by Autumn Richardson

This is an excerpt from You Came To Me, from Autumn Richardson’s new collection Ajar To The Night.

you came to me as a song

that I could not sing

it broke the branches

of the tree in which I rested

it broke my rest

~

you came to me as a torch

that devoured me

I was relieved of leaves

and left with blood-

brightness and with thorns

~

you come to me now

as a wind that assails me

with fury and with salt

to purify the wounds of my

own making

~

you are a horn

lifted to the sky

a howl piercing the blue

cells of the air

. . .

I feel you as a current

as dark, as sinuous, as

a cormorant slipping through

the belly of the sea

~

in the caverns of the earth

I recognised you

and in the veins

of smoke of birch

~

you are the dweller inside

the atria of hills

~

I lower myself through

oesophageal stones

into dens of scent

~

sightless, seeking bulb

and frond

I lift from unlit passages

medicines proliferating

in darkness

***

Autumn Richardson is a poet, editor and publisher. She is the co-founder of Corbel Stone Press, one of the UK’s foremost small presses dedicated to writing about landscape and nature, with composer and writer Richard Skelton. She is also the co-editor of Reliquiae, a biannual journal of poetry, short fiction, non-fiction and translations. Her poetry, texts and translations have featured in literary journals, pamphlets, anthologies and exhibitions worldwide. Her books include Heart of Winter (2016), a book of found-poems and translations based upon the journals of polar explorer Knud Rasmussen, and An Almost-Gone Radiance (2018), which was selected as a Scottish Book of the Year by The Scottish Review of Books. Her most recent collection, Ajar To The Night, focuses upon the doctrine of metempsychosis; cyclical existence in all its forms on earth, universal sentience and the inexorable resurgence of the divine feminine. It was published in May 2020 by Scarlet Imprint.